Comments on: Killing a process http://www.bradrice.com/wposx/archives/43 This site is about scripting with a particular emphasis on OS X. Other things OS X, too. Fri, 30 Jul 2010 04:05:52 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1 By: Anonymous http://www.bradrice.com/wposx/archives/43#comment-92 Anonymous Sat, 26 Nov 2005 10:30:04 +0000 http://www.bradrice.com/wposx/?p=43#comment-92 kill -9 is awfully harsh, that's the take-no-prisoners method to forcibly quit an application in UNIX. A nicer way is "kill -TERM [pid]", which should work unless the process is totally hung and not responding to signals. Also, you might want to check out the "killall" command, which kills processes by name. For example, here's how you can kill TextEdit if it's open: killall TextEdit kill -9 is awfully harsh, that’s the take-no-prisoners method to forcibly quit an application in UNIX.

A nicer way is “kill -TERM [pid]“, which should work unless the process is totally hung and not responding to signals.

Also, you might want to check out the “killall” command, which kills processes by name.

For example, here’s how you can kill TextEdit if it’s open:

killall TextEdit

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